Troubled Kashmir

Public companies have had a difficult decade, battered by scandals, tied up by regulations and challenged by alternative corporate forms PUBLIC companies have been the locomotives of capitalism since they were invented in the mid-19th century. They have installed themselves at the heart of the world’s largest economy, the United States. In the 1990s they [...]

The recent electoral results in Greece was a serious blow to the governments of Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy [referred collectively as ‘Merkozy’], as well as to all those arrogant neoliberal parties, politicians, analysts, EU, ECB and IMF officials who thought that the European people can suffer passively and for an indefinite period the extreme [...]

Alasdair Macintyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953-1974 Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2009. lxiv + 443pp., $28 pb; Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2008, £89.10 hb   Reviewed by Gideon Calder Gideon Calder (gideon.calder@newport.ac.uk) is Reader in Ethics and Social Philosophy at the University of Wales, Newport, where he is also director of the Social Ethics Research [...]

Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance, and Utopia Lucius & Lucius, Stuttgart, 2008. 281 pp., €35 pb   Reviewed by Jeffery Nicholas   Jeffery Nicholas is an associate professor of philosophy at Mount Angel Seminary in Oregon. He’s the editor of Dune and Philosophy (April 2011) and the executive secretary of the International Society for MacIntyrean Enquiry [...]

Jane Austen … ‘Of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness.’ Photograph: Stock Montage/Getty Images Jane Austen’s admirer Virginia Woolf said that “of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness”. It is a brilliant insight. The apparent modesty of [...]

A Marine walks among Afghan students just released from classes in Helmand. (U.S. Marine Corps / flickr) Ten years into the war in Afghanistan, the United States and its coalition partners face a range of adversaries — insurgent groups, narcotics-trafficking organizations, and criminal networks — that have thrived on the erosion of the rule of [...]

In advance of the NATO summit meeting on Afghanistan, American officials are claiming real progress in the fight against the Taliban. “Every day we’re gaining traction,” Gen. John Allen, the top commander in Afghanistan, told reporters last week. There is improvement, but we are skeptical that the situation is that encouraging. The Taliban continue to [...]

History has judged Che as an all-time icon, while it will not treat Osama bin Laden with any measure of sympathy, though both fought against the hegemony of imperialism Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her biography summed up Voltaire’s beliefs, while attributing the following phrase to him, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will [...]

PITY Karolos Papoulias. The 82-year-old president of Greece has spent over a week trying to persuade the country’s fractious political leaders to form a government after a general election on May 6th failed to produce a clear winner. Mr Papoulias, a soft-spoken former foreign minister, handed out mandates to various party leaders, none of whom [...]

Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2010. 336pp., $22.50 pb   Reviewed by Barry Healy Barry Healy is a life-long Australian socialist, living in Perth Western Australia. His writings appear mainly in the Green Left Weekly and Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. His particular [...]